The

The Hello and welcome to politics theory other. My name is Alex Doherty and my guest today is

Quinn Slobodian. We talked about his new book, Hayek's Bastards, the neoliberal roots

of the populist right. Whilst politicians and thinkers of the new right are typically

characterised as being fierce opponents of neoliberalism, in the book Quinn shows how the emergence

of the populist right developed through a split within the neoliberal movement itself, as the

disciples of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig Gronmises

sought to confront the challenge of new social movements as the Cold War ended.

We talked about the intellectual development of the new right,

why their neoliberal heritage is often ignored,

and how their racism and obsession with borders,

though often seen as merely irrational and

atavistic, contains its own form of economic rationality.

Quinn Slobodian is Professor of International History at Boston University. His books include

Globalists, The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, and Crack Up Capitalism, Market Radicals, and the Dream of a Worldism, and crack up capitalism, market radicals and the dream of a world

without democracy. His most recent book, which was the topic of our conversation, is High Ex-Bastards,

The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right.

So Quinn, in the latest issue of the London Review of Books, Perry Anderson has an essay on the neoliberal era, and he describes neoliberalism as a regime in the sense of, as he puts

it, arrangements assuring cooperative economic relations between the major industrial states,

which might or might not take

the form of treaties. And he contrasts this, of course, with the Bretton Woods regime of the post-war

era. And he goes on to write in the essay that this system now generated its antibody,

...